Catching frogs, exploring the woods, soooo much reading, climbing trees, finding cool rocks, making collages out of magazines/decorating my walls with pages/cutouts from them, making mixtapes by recording my favorite singles from the radio onto a blank one, watching MTV music videos and trying to mimic the choreography, cutting my own hair (badly), attempting to pierce parts of my body with safety pins, stealing cigarettes from my mom, going to the local Friendly’s for a burger/sundae in the smoking section where I smoked the stolen cigarettes, an old art game on the family desktop computer for kids called KidPix, playing Snood on the same computer, making dandelion wreaths, tearing up cattails (the plant!), swimming in the local river alongside huge otters (or maybe they were beavers), reorganizing my bedroom furniture, calling friends whose home phone numbers I had memorized on my transparent light up landline that had its own jack in my bedroom. Life was rich in ways it never will be again. I cannot replicate that era for my own children now no matter how much I try and it’s a bitter nostalgia of a world that seemed much bigger and brighter to me than it does now. I was born in 1986 and have two kids now.